A blog about the works and worlds of HP Lovecraft and my feeble attempts to illustrate them.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Gnophkehs finished painting and Nodens illustration studies.

The Gnophkehs. Found in the stories, Polaris, The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath and At the Mountains of Madness, these primate-like creatures were the inveterate foes of the noble men of Lomar in ages immemorial our time, in either the world we know or The Dreamlands.

In Polaris it's said that the Lomarians destroyed the Gnophkehii when they marched south from encroaching glaciation before, much like the consecutively iterate nomad migrations into the late Classical Roman Empire, they themselves were displaced/destroyed by the encroaching Inutos coming from the same northern direction. However, Lovecraft seems to have changed his mind later on, as in Dream-quest and Mountains, he described that it was the Gnophkehs who invaded and destroyed the Lomarians, cutting out the Inutos altogether. This painting is based on the latter conception of the story, though frankly the former iteration to me echoes the most of actual history and so I'm thinking of doing a rendering of the Inutos, as well as one of the Lomarians, all which will be framed at the same ratio and in roughly the same poses, like a great fantasy diptych! You can find my other Polaris-related painting here.

I also enjoyed painting this because it reminded me of all the Frazetta paintings I've adored and loved, as well as cheesy sword and sorcery movies like Fire and Ice, which I always love watching while painting.

Here's some Nodens concepts for an upcoming illustration of the venerable old Lovecraft god. I based the staff/trident on the fact he was historically interchangeable, among others, with the gods Silvanus and Neptune, so I thought it would be interesting to combine Silvanus' cypress trunk, which he's depicted carrying in iconography, with the trident of Neptune. He's also arguably attributed to king Nuada of Ireland, though there's no absolute certainty in that regard.